May, 2009

Introduction
The writing-mode property enables text layout for non-Latin languages like Japanese and Arabic. Supported in IE since release 5.5, this property has been significantly updated in IE8. Our goals were threefold:
To make its behavior more predictable for developers
To align with relatively newer CSS concepts like shrink-to-fit sizing
To further the CSS3 Text Layout module by providing the first implementation.
This post walks through the basics of the new implementation...

The May IE Chat has been rescheduled for Thursday, May 28 st at 10.00 PST/17.00 UTC. We apologize for any inconveniences.
As always transcripts of previous chats are available here .
See you next week!
Allison Burnett Program Manager

As display technologies advance and the world begins to fully embrace accessibility on the web, the Zoom and High DPI experience of all browsers has become increasingly important. This is the first in a series of posts describing changes and improvements to Internet Explorer 8 to enable a more readable web on today’s displays. In this post, we’ll focus on enhancements to the Zoom user experience.
How to Use Zoom
First, let’s review how to take advantage of Zoom in Internet Explorer 8. Internet...

This post is intended for IT administrators, but more technical users might also find it useful.
During Internet Explorer 8 development we paid very close attention to Line of Business (LOB) application compatibility for large enterprises. We want IE8 to be an easy drop-in replacement for earlier versions of IE, so that all users can benefit from the improved speed, security and ease of use of IE8.
Like Microsoft, your organization probably depends on a very large number of Line of Business...

Our typical posts here are original information about the product from the people who built the product. This morning, I ran across a well-written article from PC Magazine with “some tips about features that you may not have noticed” in IE8.
We try to post a lot of useful information on this site (e.g. Session Cookies, sessionStorage, and IE8 or “How can I log into two webmail accounts at the same time?” ) and it’s both exciting and humbling to see professional writers take it a step further....

Hi again! I’m Helen Drislane, a Program Manager on the IE team and I will be discussing how IE integrates into the new Windows 7 taskbar.
Since the new taskbar was completely redesigned to improve window management, I will first describe the new behavior of the taskbar, then talk about how IE takes advantage of that behavior, and then wrap it up by answering some of the common questions we get asked about IE and the new taskbar.
THE NEW TASKBAR BEHAVIOR
As Chaitanya describes in great detail...

This post walks through the IE setup experience and the choices it offers users. There have been a bunch of web postings recently that have described aspects of IE setup and first run, not entirely accurately. We hope this information clarifies some of your questions about upgrading to IE8 on Windows Vista or Windows XP machines. (While the scenario where IE8 gets installed as part of Windows 7 is essentially the same, this post is focused on the upgrade scenarios that most users will encounter today...

When designing Accelerators for IE8, we had a number of scenarios in mind. Primarily, we looked at the all-too-common user pattern of copy-navigate-paste and decided we could save our users a lot of time and frustration by enabling some sort of contextual interaction between content and services. For example, the classic example is mapping—the user finds an address buried in a page, and instead of having to navigate to a mapping service, can receive the map inline via a preview window:
We...

For Internet Explorer 8, we’ve made browser session handling a lot simpler. For instance, say you want to have two Hotmail windows open, each logged into a different account. Simply click the New Session item on the File menu, and a new browser window will open. The new browser window will not share session cookies with the original browser window, so you can log into Hotmail (and most web applications) as a different user. For command line junkies, you can run iexplore.exe with the -nomerge parameter...

Just wanted to get a post out to let people know that we’ve updated the IE VPC Test images. These images are meant to make it easier for you to ensure your website works properly across different browser versions and different operating systems without having to have a separate box dedicated to that particular OS. You can download them via the IE Developer Center or more directly through the Microsoft Download Center . As a reminder, you need to have Virtual PC installed on your computer which is...

As we described on Monday , the IE8 in Windows 7 RC includes additional tab “hang” reporting functionality. This functionality relies on a timer threshold to determine when a tab might be unresponsive. This threshold was calibrated based on data from internal Microsoft users.
As we began to look at data coming in from real-world Win7 RC users, we noticed that some users are being prompted to recover from hung tabs more frequently than some would like. We stated on Monday that if the data suggests...

With the “final” release of IE8 for Windows Vista and other versions of Windows in several languages , we’ve been focused on finishing IE8 in Windows 7. We’ll blog soon about the updates in IE8 in the Windows 7 Release Candidate around the Windows 7-specific features , like tabs in the taskbar, jump list, and touch. Today’s post is about reliability and telemetry.
As in Win7, an important goal in IE8 was increasing reliability. For example, IE8 isolates crashing tabs from each other. If you’re...

As a follow-up to my prior blog post about Automatic Update/Windows Update distribution that began gradually in April, I want to provide an overview of the control users have over the installation and experience.
First, to reiterate what I explained last month: when offered by Automatic Update, IE8 will not automatically install- the user has control over whether to upgrade to IE8. When offered IE8, three choices are offered: Ask later, install, or don’t install. If one chooses “Ask me later”...

The sixth edition of the Security Intelligence Report (SIR), Microsoft’s semi-annual report on the state of computer security was published on April 8, 2009. Using data derived from hundreds of millions of computers worldwide and some of the busiest online services on the Internet, this report provides an in-depth perspective on trends in:
Software vulnerabilities (both in Microsoft software and in third-party software)
Software exploits
Security and privacy breaches
Malicious and...